The Marseille-based data center operator Phocea DC announces that Marguerite, a pan-European infrastructure fund, is entering its capital, with investments backed by the European Union’s InvestEU program.
This operation, complemented by bank financing, is intended to enable the company to deploy an investment plan exceeding €120 million.
Founded in 2023 by Damien Desanti, Phocea DC completed an initial €5 million funding round from Reflexion Capital to finance its first site, which opened in January 2025 in Marseille’s 3rd arrondissement.
This 1,700 m² site develops a power capacity of 1.2 MW, meets the Tier 3 standard, and shows a target PUE of 1.2. A second site is already in development, as part of an edge data-centers network distributed across the city.
While AI-related investments are concentrated on projects of several hundred megawatts, Phocea DC positions its offerings on installations of a few megawatts, aimed at latency requirements, regulated hosting, or business continuity that large campuses do not necessarily cover.
Heat Recovery and Regulatory Anchoring
Urban placement, near housing and economic activities, should enable the company to connect its future sites to district heating networks from design, so as to redistribute the heat produced by the servers to nearby residents, industries, and institutions.
Phocea DC also highlights Marseille’s situation, where sixteen submarine cables land, making it one of the world’s major Internet entry points.
The company operates under French law with suppliers based in France and holds ISO 27001, HDS (health data hosting), PCI-DSS, and ISO 22301 certifications. Its clients include local authorities, healthcare facilities, businesses, telecom operators, and IT outsourcing providers.
The operator indicates an intention to replicate this proximity data-center model in other French and European cities, without providing a schedule or list of cities at this stage.
